Sometimes I think the universe is watching itself.
Apparently there was a time, not so long ago, when scientists believed the universe was shrinking. Even Einstein toyed with the idea of a contracting cosmos, though that would all change when Edwin Hubble came along and discovered that everything was speeding away from everything else. Galaxies still carry that momentum, drifting ever outward like cosmic flotsam left over from a titanic explosion.
Some call this the great Birth: the Big Bang that sent debris flying across the void with a force beyond measure, mother and grandmother of all nuclear arms combined. Over time, that initial burst lost its edge, and gravity began gathering the scattered remains. Dust and rock and fiery gas clumped together into bigger and bigger bodies, each new mass pulling in whatever happened to float by. The universe itself, though, continued its outward surge—an expanding realm with trillions of islands drifting in a sea of black.
We find ourselves somewhere in the middle of that birth cycle, or so it seems. One day, the propulsion that fuels expansion may dwindle, and cosmic stillness could descend. At that point, contraction might begin. Some believe it will be like a heartbeat: expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction. Objects far-flung in the early era would then start coming back together, each one swelling in size as it devours the smaller debris in its path. In time, perhaps, the whole cosmos might collapse into one enormous, impossibly dense core. With nowhere left to go, with too much matter squeezed into an impossibly tight space, the universe could reach a point where containment is no longer possible. That pressure might trigger a new cataclysm—a second Big Bang.
No one can say for sure if this is true. It fits our observations to some degree, and scientists have long noted that energy is constant and cyclical, that every beginning has an end and every end has a beginning. But certainty eludes us, so we dwell in possibility. There is talk of nirvana as a state beyond cycles, yet even nirvana seems like part of a pattern we barely grasp. Redundant, cyclical, the same dance unfolding in different shapes and forms. In that sense, nothing ever truly dies; everything merely changes costume.
Sometimes I picture the universe pondering itself, wondering about the smaller details of existence. Take the mosquito, for instance. In school, we learned that the deadliest creature on Earth is that little buzzing insect, the mass murderer that outdoes any lion or shark by far. Does that make the mosquito evil, or simply a function of nature? Perhaps humans will engineer it out of existence someday, gene-editing the entire species into oblivion. We like to think the mosquito is useless. Maybe that is true; maybe it is not.
Sub specie eternitatis, as suggested by Spinoza, a mosquito’s place in the grand scheme is just another piece of the whole. Does it matter if it kills us or we kill it? Eventually, all of us bow to something larger, no matter how small we once thought ourselves or our adversaries to be. Clear and clinical logic says the universe will continue its lonely dance, swirling from birth to death and back again, and our tiny battles on Earth will simply fold into that cosmic cycle. If there is any real truth in all this, maybe it is that we are all part of the same expansion, the same contraction, bound by forces we cannot see, struggling to fit everything into a single suitcase until it bursts open and we start all over again
By 2ndrevolution.org